> Well there certainly is at least some kind of viable business running large AI models for a fee.
ok, where are:
- The economies of scale?
- The network effects?
- The switching costs?
- The intangible assets (e.g. brand?)
Running AI models for a fee has none of these. At best, there are some economies of scale for running a datacenter, but OpenAI and Anthropic have none.
There are not as many network effects, intangible assets, or switching costs as other businesses. I believe there are economies of scale in terms of power and cooling and network bandwidth and the people who plug in cables and other such things.
The business logic is similar to the general transition to cloud. Corporations and individuals are better off paying someone else to manage physical hardware that they just access over the network. That is even more true of large, expensive, fancy AI GPUs than regular web servers.
OpenAI and Anthropic may both fail, or may not, I don't know. But I'm sure there is some kind of viable business running some kind of AI in the cloud.
> OpenAI and Anthropic may both fail, or may not, I don't know. But I'm sure there is some kind of viable business running some kind of AI in the cloud.
The problem is that the investment does not expect "some kind of viable business" ROI needs to be in the order of several trillion for this to make any sense.
Well sometimes when people invest money that does not work out.
That money may not be made back in the way people hope.
But there is a whole ecosystem of companies on OpenRouter etc. who have a viable commodity business serving Chinese open source models on GPUs. I'm sure at least some kind of business like that will survive even if OpenAI and Anthropic completely fail. And I'm sure AWS, GCP and Azure will end up having something like that too.
Amazon will be able to run large models for a fee, and make money on it. It's not a trillion dollar business, it may not even be a good business, but they'll be able to do it.
Sure, a supermarket will sell avocados if they make a profit, and won't sell them if they don't. That's a very different business model; the product is the infrastructure, not the AI.